Battlestar Galactica - Legacy
by Thom216
Summary: After Galactica sweep across the moon, evidence of her passage was left for her decedents to find... This is a short at under 2700 words. It may continue, who knows. In the end, I just hope you enjoy it! Thom The story continues here - /s/11500957/1/Battlestar-Galactica-Legacy-Chapter-1


Prologue

February 6, 1971

Apollo 14

Vicinity Fra Mauro Base, Lunar surface

The sky was dark. Pitch black from gray horizon to gray horizon, with stars sprinkled across the vastness lending no illumination, but plenty of mystery. Against the terrain that looked like one would see on a pale rocky beach that stretched beyond sight, moved two tiny figures swathed in bulky white. Their ridged foot prints detailed their course across the undulating, silty terrain, their progress performed with lurching jumps against the incredible light gravity.

Far behind them, a lone structure stood out from the moon's pale face as a tiny white glimmer. The black and silver of the lunar lander _Antares_ stood as only a few human structures did on the moon. Rare and out of place, it was a tiny life-line to the small blue marble lifting over the horizon. The two men, astronauts from the United States of America, were only a select few of humans to ever step on the surface, and they were lost.

Not in the sense that they didn't know where they were, but in that they couldn't find where they were going.

"I could have sworn that the boys in Houston said they left the crater right here," joked Alan Shephard, commander of the mission.

His companion, Lunar Module pilot Edgar Mitchell chuckled, his breath loud in the suit's helmet. "Well, if they can't get even these directions right, maybe we shouldn't be trusting them to strap our asses to rockets!"

Their comms crackled and then filled with the voice of Stuart Roosa, the Command Module pilot currently still in orbit. "I don't know what you guys are complaining about. I can see it from up here. Just a couple paces to your left Alan."

"Right, just that easy. Tell you what, Stuart, why don't you put your hand out the window and point it out to us."

In orbit, weightless within the cramped confines of the Command Module _Kitty Hawk_ , Stuart grinned while holding a bulky 70mm camera to one of the windows. He was snapping pictures of the terrain and the craters and gullies that littered the surface. He was far too high to see his commander and fellow pilot, but joking around relieved the tedium of performing experiments and watching tree seeds floating around in their baggies. It also helped with the loneliness that he would never admit to. It had only been a few days since the _Antares_ had descended to the surface, but there was a lot of emptiness out there to get lost in, and far too little room in the tiny command module to try and fool oneself into believing that they weren't alone, 116 kilometers above the moon, and almost 230,000 miles from Earth...

"I would do that boss, but it's a mite cold out there, and the wind chill I hear is just to die for…"

"Alright then. Keep it locked tight. We wouldn't want our ride home getting too cold. Okay, Fredo. We are in the middle of a fairly large boulder field. It covers as much as a quarter mile. And, as the pan will show, I don't believe we have quite reached the rim yet. However, we can't be too far away."

"Shepard, Houston," came the crackled voice of Fred Haise from Houston, Texas. "Do you wish to continue on ahead?"

Alan shared a look with Edger, receiving an agreeing nod.

"That's affirmative, Fred. Just a little longer anyway. Then I think we'll be able to take the last LPM reading at the next stop."

"Roger Al. Very good. And Al and Ed, when you can work it in, we'd like an EMU check."

"Okay," responded Alan. "It is now 3.75 and reading 52 on oxygen. I'm in medium flow and comfortable. No flags."

"Ed here, I'm reading at 3.75 and I'm 48 on oxygen. I'm in Min flow now, having just shifted. I'm comfortable."

"Roger that. All systems still in the green?"

"Yes, still in the green, Fred."

They continued on in companionable silence for another few yards, approaching the rocky rise of Saddle Rock. Their breaths were loud in the enclosed helmets, their shadows stretching ahead of them up the rise that they struggled against.

"What do you say, Al? A few more yards then turn back?" asked Edgar. "I know it should be easy to find a 1000 foot wide crater, but this is ridiculous. Against the horizon, we could be a few feet or a mile away from what little perspective I have. Besides," he added with a grin Alan could hear over the comm, "you didn't bring those golf clubs up here just so they could take up space in the LEM."

Alan stopped, puffing in his breath, for though their weight was only one fourth of what it would be on Earth, they were lugging around a lot of equipment just to keep themselves alive. And though their weight was less, their _mass_ was still the same. Hopping around like a kangaroo made you get tired real quick.

"Dammit," he muttered. The moon's surface was deceptive, rising and dipping like a rolling sea forever frozen in time. The rim of Cone Crater could be just past the next roll in the terrain. Or it could be off to their left or right and passed already. "Alright, let's hold up. Fredo, this country is so rolling and undulating, with rises and dips everywhere, that we could be walking by a fairly good sized crater and not even recognize it. I don't like saying it, but we may have to wait to the next trip up here," he said, which was wishful thinking on his part.

Even before Apollo 13, budget cuts to the space program had been digging deep into NASA's pockets. While he was talking about a next time, he realized that _this time_ might be his only walk on this endless gray beach. And he didn't want it to end. It was lonely and stark, with sharp contrasts between dark space and shiny gray moon, and it was incredibly beautiful. Heart stopping.

"Al, that big bolder you pointed out before is… You're just about at Saddle Rock now? Is that right?"  
"Ah, probably a couple of meters short now, yes."

"Okay, Al. We're on Saddle Rock Task. We'd like a pan and grab samples at Saddle. And we'll pick up most of our tasks that we bypassed at E when we got to Triplet."

"Okay, I'll get the pan," said Alan as he turned slowly, letting the camera strapped to his suit chest get an image of the area. "It's beautiful country up here, Fred. We'd have a better time if they'd hurry and get those dune buggies up here already. I'd like to go out and explore a little more…"

"We understand that too. Rather than golf clubs, maybe you should have brought along a pogo stick," joked Haise.

Edger and Stuart laughed as Alan pressed his lips tight to keep from joining in. As they chuckled it out, he turned and took a step to start back, then nearly pitched backward.

Not a pace behind him, Edger grabbed a hold of his bulky pack to keep from him falling. At one fourth gravity it wouldn't be a hard fall, but then again it wouldn't take much force for a rock to break his face shield.

"Wow there, you alright, Al?"

"Yes, good. Thanks, Ed." He gained his footing and turned to look down. His heavy, thick soled boot had caught on a rocky protuberance jutting up from the shifty powder of the lunar regolith. "Watch your step there, I caught my toe on that… rock…"

"Which rock? Or is that just another excuse for you being a clumsy old fart?" Edger joked. Except that Alan wasn't paying attention, and Edger's smile started to slip when he looked down as well. "What the Hell…"

Hardly hearing him, Alan painstakingly knelt down in the bulky suit, his eyes not leaving the sharply defined edge that his boot track had exposed under the gray lunar powder. The edge itself was only about five or six inches long, one end disappearing under the regolith as the other came to a barely defined corner just breaching the surface.

More disbelieving, Alan reached down and brushed his thick gloves over it, his heartbeat increasing as he found the surface smooth and hard. A few more strokes of his hand brushed enough of the lunar soil aside to expose an undeniably smooth white surface with a gap underneath. He wedged his bulky fingers under it and gave it a tentative tug. With almost no weight, the object popped up in a rising slow motion shower of powdery regolith.

He looked at Edger, seeing the other man's eyes going as wide as he felt his own were. It was metal. Stiff and light, the gray lunar soil drifting off to expose a white smooth surface. About fifteen inches long, it reached a corner, the edge there being only four or five inches before it became warped and jagged and connected back with the first edge in a roughly elongated triangle. He turned it over. The bottom was dark gray with strengthening corrugations running perpendicular to the long edge, their ends also bent and warped, and actually torn. Along the long edge there were evenly spaces holes, which Alan's befuddled mind wanted to imagine would be perfect for rivets or screws…

"What the Hell is this?" he asked softly.

"Trash, I guess. Leave it to humans to find trash where no one else has ever been, huh?" Edger weakly tried to joke. "That's probably all it is. Possibly some junk fell off one of the orbiting satellites."

Alan's gaze met his. "Most of this was covered with almost four inches of regolith, Ed…"

'Regolith' was simply the word used for the powdery debris kicked up from asteroid impacts. The impact would launch a cloud of it up from the surface, which the moon's week gravity would soon pull back down, and spread about in the process. Millions of years of impacts had left the surface of the moon cratered and pockmarked over much of its surface, and had also left this lunar 'soil.' Solar winds distributed it even more, to the point that regolith would accumulate as much as one millimeter per century. And with four inches equaling to about one hundred millimeters…

Edger didn't have an answer for that. He tried for one, but none would reach past his lips. They could both do the numbers, and just the implications of it were staggering. Trying to keep his breath even, Alan couldn't help but look around, his eyes seeing the terrain in ways he would not have considered before. It was ridiculous to even think it, but then it was difficult to imagine what he was holding in his trembling hands.

In his ears, Fred at mission control in Houston was calling for an update, with Edger replying back to wait one. The stress in his tone reminded Alan that they needed to keep calm and think through this. It was possible that a piece of debris from a satellite had landed at such an angle as to dig itself in under the soil. It was possible, despite the fact that before he pulled it up, there had been almost no disturbance in the surface that he remembered seeing but for their own bulky footprints.

This part of the moon's surface was rolling with gentle hills, marked with low rocky outcrops barely hip high, except for Saddle Rock just ahead and to their right. Then there was the rise they were following…

With a lance glance at the object he held, Alan handed it to Edger and started forward again. He tuned out Edger and Fredo, answering only to the urge within himself, to see if there was anything more than just that fragment. His gaze swept left and right, knowing it was ludicrous to expect to see some shape among the rolling and jagged landscape that could be seen as anything but natural. But he couldn't slow down. That urge to explore, to see beyond the highest hill in the distance that burned in the blood of every human still simmered within him, and now it had a goad to take that last step more.

Edger followed, saving his breath to match his commander's pace, and continuing to tell Fred and Stuart repeatedly to 'hold one.' And then Alan came to a lurching stop, and Edger hurried to reach his side.

The ground dropped away before them, a raised ridge circling into the distant left and right to define the edge of Cone Crater. They'd found it. But there was no thrill at having reached their goal. Any thoughts of comparing samples from the bottom of Cone to the ejecta blanket of the surrounding terrain suddenly seemed terribly unimportant.

The slope dropped away at their feet, a leisurely decline pebbled with varying sized rocks that could still make footing treacherous. A third of the crater bottom was in shadow, a delineation that in space would mean the difference between warm sunlight and freezing dark, but the rest was not. It was brilliantly lit, and would have been - if not for being on the Moon - sadly unimpressive. Would have been, had their eyes not settled immediately on the peculiar shape nestled at the very bottom of the incline…

"Al, Fredo. What's going on up there guys? You being silent and all is kinda worrying us down here."

Alan found his voice first. "We copy, Fredo. I believe we're at the edge of Cone. We can see the bottom from here. Hold one."

"We can't keep holding forever, Alan. We have a mission to perform."

"Understood. Just hold and give us a moment."

Not waiting for a reply, Alan started down the slope, his breath coming sharp and ragged. And even more so as he neared the shape, a whirl of disbelief filling his head. The closer he went the higher it was, its form shrouded in gray regolith around its base and up the sides, as if it had been there for so long that it was becoming part of the moon itself. Finally he was only a few paces away, and even in the low lunar gravity, his knees felt too weak to keep him on his feet.

"My God, Alan, was is it?" asked Edgar, his voice hushed.

Alan shook his head. 'It' was almost eight feet tall at its highest point and easily almost twenty feet long. It probably would have been even longer, but the far end was bent and ragged and half buried in lunar soil, meaning the part that faced them was lifted upward at about ten degrees. More than enough to expose what looked like a trio of darkened engine nozzles, one stacked above a lower pair, with the white, grimy surfaces of their nacelles sweeping forward.

Alan moved around it, trying to comprehend what he was seeing, eyes following the slender curves and straight lines, and finding himself unable to. It was a wreck, its shape mangled, and above the regolith it was the same dirty white hue as the part Edger still held lax in one hand. But there was red too. A stripe of it climbing what was now so obviously a tail structure mounted from the high nacelle. And in front of that…

The canopy had come loose. And considering the forces involved when it impacted the crater, Allan dearly hoped that the suited figure slumped in the seat hadn't lived long after that.

"Dear God…" he muttered.

"Alan, this is Fredo. What the Hell's going on up there? Alan?" Fred asked again, his voice becoming more than just worried or agitated. "Commander Shepard?!"

"Fredo… Fred…" Alan shook himself, realizing that he was worrying his friends, and knowing that they _should_ be worried! He got his voice under control. "Houston, this is Apollo 14. We have a- We have a _situation_ up here…"

The End..?


End file.
